Twitter officials have indicated that the social media platform deletes over one million fake accounts every day, highlighting efforts to reduce automated users after billionaire Elon Musk demanded more details from the company. This statement comes after Musk threatened to halt a $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter unless the company provides evidence that fake accounts and automated accounts are less than five percent of the users viewing ads on the social media service. Musk previously stated that one of his top priorities after acquiring Twitter is to "overcome automated and fake accounts."
The Washington Post reported yesterday that Musk's acquisition of the social media platform is in "serious jeopardy" due to doubts regarding the number of fake accounts and the difficulty in verifying them. In a conference call, the company reaffirmed that fake accounts are well below five percent of the users who view ads, a number that has not changed in the company's data since 2013. Twitter stated that human reviewers manually examine thousands of accounts on the platform randomly and use a mixture of public and private data to estimate the ratio of fake and automated accounts on the service and communicate this to shareholders.
They added that they do not believe the estimation of the size of such accounts could be done externally, as it would require private information, but they declined to comment on the type of data they would provide to Musk.
